Ukraine's armed forces 'in a pickle'

Ukrainian soldier enjoying the open air life

While politicians talk of Ukraine's entry into Nato and the top brass map out plans for a professional army, Ukrainian conscripts have to earn their daily bread working as farm labourers.

In a sarcastic report, Ukraine's Inter television shows young soldiers harvesting grain, making hay, grazing cattle and canning vegetables.

Rather than wait for meagre handouts from the cash-strapped budget, wise commanders have chosen to stock up on food for the winter while they have the chance.

Local farmers are "full of praise" for the soldiers, the TV says.

No rush to go back to their military units

Ukrainian TV

"Where else could you find workers whom you could pay with pickled vegetables and stewed fruit instead of cold, hard cash?" it asks.

Nor are the "defenders of the homeland" themselves particularly displeased.

They are "in no rush to go back to their military units," the TV comments, adding that many young servicemen have grown used to village life.

They hate the idea of returning to drills, let alone combat training.

Crisis of confidence

While the practice of soldiers working on the land is not new, even dating back to Soviet times, now the situation only serves to further undermine public trust in the armed forces.

The military are striving to recover from the shock of the disastrous blunder which saw a fighter jet crash into a the crowd of spectators in July, killing 85.

Making hay while the sun shines

This was preceded by two other military-related accidents, where stray missiles hit a residential building in 2000 and shot down a Russian airliner in 2001.

The influential Ukrainian weekly Zerkalo Nedeli is sure poor financing lies at the heart of the problem.

The recently sacked Ukrainian Chief of General Staff, Petro Shulyak, has said that in 2001, the forces got only half the funds officially allocated from the state budget.

The air show deaths were a disaster waiting to happen, given that the air force got a mere 5% of what it needed in 2002.

This resulted in pilots flying an average of three to five hours a year as opposed to 140-150 hours for Nato pilots.

Little wonder that many have "started to doubt the need for the country to have an army at all," Zerkalo Nedeli says, describing it as "menace", rather than a source of protection for Ukrainians.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.